Sarah Perez

Sarah currently works as a writer for TechCrunch, after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to becoming a professional blogger, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software.

Latest from Sarah Perez

Woofound, a Maryland-based startup aiming to match your personality to things you want to do, is today launching its iOS application nationwide. The app turns rating activities, places and restaurants into a simple, visual game in order to serve up highly personalized recommendations. You rate things by tapping or clicking “Me” or “Not Me” on the items suggested –… Read More

Any.DO, the gorgeous to-do app for Android, has finally made its way to the iPhone and the web today. Developed by the team behind Taskos, one of the most popular to-do list applications on the Android Market, Any.DO launched last November backed by $1 million in angel funding, making a few iPhone users (ahem *clears throat*) jealous of something on Android for a change.
Besides the basics… Read More

Earlier this month, Bing, the other white meat search engine, revealed its big redesign, which put a heavy emphasis on social search. Today, Microsoft announced the new version of Bing.com is now available to all U.S. users. Nothing has changed between then and now, but if you regularly visit Bing.com to perform searches (ha, right?) then you’ll definitely notice a big difference. The… Read More

Happy Friday, here’s some more patent trolling nonsense for you today: Google said on Thursday it had filed a complaint with the European Commission which claims cell phone maker Nokia is colluding with Microsoft to make money off their patents. The complaint states that the two companies are using proxy companies (read: patent trolls) to fight against Google Android.
Nokia has since… Read More

Another entry in the mobile-first, private social networking for families space (yes, apparently this is a thing now): 23snaps, a new iOS application that works like a mini-Facebook for posting status updates, photos and videos of your kids. The app isn’t anywhere near as dazzling as current private social network darling Path, but it’s a functional and easy-to-use alternative to… Read More

Much of the time when you talk about browser market share, it’s in the context of IE vs. Chrome vs. all the rest. But new data released from e-commerce technology company Monetate today has thrown the mobile version of Safari into the mix. The result? The firm found Mobile Safari to be the most rapidly growing web browser over the past year on its sites, going from 5.84% in Q1 2011… Read More

Y Combinator’s Paul Graham recently begged entrepreneurs to consider “frightening ambitious startup ideas,” like building a better search engine or replacing universities. “Any one of them could make you a billionaire,” said Graham. “That might sound like an attractive prospect, and yet when I describe these ideas you may notice you find yourself… Read More

Remember this report about Google Chrome passing Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in browser market share? Well, at today’s D10 conference, Chrome SVP Sundar Pichai basically confirmed this is true, saying that Chrome is “#1 in most countries” and even noting that Chrome’s market share is over 50% in some regions.
One-third of people are using Chrome, said Pichai. Read More

Popular blogging platform Tumblr has quietly introduced a minor, but notable new feature: a better way to find contacts through your other social networking services or Gmail. On the page available at Tumblr.com/lookup you can now connect your Gmail, Twitter and/or Facebook accounts to find all your friends’ Tumblr blogs.
Handy. Well, handy if you’re the one doing the looking… Read More

This month, app store analytics firm Distimo is taking a step back from analyzing the details of mobile app trends to survey the larger landscape of the app stores themselves. While some of the new entrants to the app store market have launched and failed over the past few years, others like Amazon’s Appstore, have proven to be more successful. Today, many mobile developers are… Read More

Diffbot, the super-geeky/awesome visual learning robot technology which aims to “see” the web the way that people do, is today announcing a new infusion of capital. The company has closed $2 million in funding from a number of technology veterans, including EarthLink founder Sky Dayton; Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems; Joi Ito, Director of MIT Media… Read More

GoCardless, the Y Combinator-backed startup founded in 2010 by Oxford graduates Hiroki Takeuchi, Tom Blomfield and Matt Robinson, is today launching a new product called PayLinks which aims to be something like a Bit.ly for payments. With its dead simple interface, anyone can create a shortened, tweet-friendly link in around 60 seconds, the company claims, allowing you to start collecting… Read More

Pinterest rival Fancy, which thinks it has figured out social commerce (or at least, before Pinterest did), is announcing today that it has reached 1 million users as well as an average of $50,000 worth of commerce through its service each week. To help further grow its shopping platform, which initially debuted in February of this year, the company has also updated its iOS application. The… Read More

PowerInbox, the email platform that’s been on a tear lately in terms of its releases, is rolling out yet another update today bringing a number of new features, including the addition of the most requested in-email app, LinkedIn. The platform already supports email “apps” like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram and Groupon, essentially making emails from those companies… Read More

Betting big on the future monetization opportunities to be found in the “smart TV” ecosystem is boxPAY, a company which is now bringing the carrier billing option to TV apps and services. With boxPAY, consumers can pay for Smart TV apps or make in-app purchases by charging those purchases to their mobile phone, no registration or credit card required. Instead, the purchase would… Read More

Sometimes you just gotta do your own thing. Such was the case with Boris Vaisman, who dropped out of Y Combinator’s winter batch (where he was on kid-safe phone lockdown tool, Kyte). Says Vaisman, it was just a matter of “having a different vision in terms of how to move forward.” So what has Vaisman, along with co-founder Ankush Agarwal, now launched instead? Play Safe, an… Read More

In the midst of Amazon’s recent moves to rapidly grow its content collection on Amazon Prime Instant Video, the company has also been brokering deals for another one of its video properties: European Netflix competitor LOVEFiLM. Today, the company is announcing a new multi-year deal with NBCUniversal International Television Distribution, which will offer LOVEFiLM members access to… Read More

WordPress just hit an impressive milestone today: it has now filtered its 50 billionth piece of spam. Akismet, the homegrown comment filtering system from WordPress maker Automattic is the tool responsible for all the spam fighting. And those spammers keep the system busy. In April, Akismet blocked 1.8 billion spam messages, or 60 million pieces of spam per day, 2.5 million per hour, or 700… Read More

Mobile app downloads continued to decline in April and the cost to acquire loyal users picked up, reports mobile marketing firm Fiksu in its latest report out today. This downward trend was expected, as no major events sparked app discovery during the month, explains Fiksu CEO Micah Adler. However, mobile app marketers were particularly aggressive in the social networking and games… Read More